is it a juvenile view to think we're slaves to society?

Yeah, so better dont be the average person.

Be like Trump. He never worked a day in his life. Or you can try being like Marx. He didnt work either. He just wrote books.

Slavery isn't voluntary.

The U.S. government has a bloated, near-useless welfare state where anyone can choose to spend their entire life not working and get a cell phone, an apartment, food stamps, and health care on Uncle Sam.

But to become rich, you have to work. Why should other people just give you THEIR stuff for free?

So there is no slavery here in the U.S. Nobody is forcing you to work. You can live like a bum here and sleep and eat in homeless shelters even if you want.

It's a type of ad hominid used to evade argument. However given the circular reasoning of these types of argument, it may be easier to just respond it's childish than to go through all of that. 

It's impossible to beat circular arguments typically because they are entirely self enclosed and rest on logic, flawed logic typically that has an answer for everything. For a common example look at the fat positivity movement. They have convinced themselves with circular logic that being health conscious is racist and that people who are 700 pounds are no more likely to face health struggles than people of a normal body weight. 

If you examine your own logic for why you believe what you do, I think you'll find it al.ost unassailable, which is why it makes critical thinking to expose that flaw in logic, very difficult.

I find it kind of odd that you're asking what we think about calling our roles in society slavery while also asking why it matters what we call it.

To answer your OP, I wouldn't call it juvenile but I do think it's wrong. As some have pointed out, the question you ask does depend entirely on what you are calling a slave, but language is ultimately about communication and the word slave carries with it a lot of emotional baggage because of its historical usage. The bulk of that emotional baggage comes from the idea associated with it - having all choice removed from an individual and essentially being regarded as property, which is why I think it's wrong to use that word for what is being highlighted here.

I get your point and not feeling like we have a choice, but the comparison still doesn't hold. For centuries human beings didn't have electricity, running water, clothes, etc. That doesn't make them slaves in any sense of the word, yet what you're really talking about is the work necessary to maintain in the things we have today. If you want to hunt your own food, clean your own drinking water, etc., you can always live like that. If you want more, someone else will have to provide these amenities to you and you are not entitled to the fruits of their labor.

Having these things is a luxury of our time, calling yourself a slave because you have to earn them doesn't work.

are you so sure that a person can choose not to participate? you guys keep saying things like 'go live off the land if you want to'. but the laws of man have made it such that we can't. that's not a law of nature. communes are not common enough for most people who might want to opt out of society. a person can't ride their horse around and essentially needs to car to participate. so what choice does the average person have? they have to buy a car, find a place to rent, and become a part of the machine.

the closest i can come to saying ya'll might be right, is the fact that a group of people can always group up and have a bunch of people living in a house with not enough rooms for everyone. there's more possibillities than this, but this is the most practical way to opt out of the grind that the average person does. but even with this way of life... we are still dependant ecnomically on society, and must work at least part time. at this point, in this hypothetical, it's fair to say we're not slaves, just that it's a practical reality... but i still think it's fair to say there's an element of slavery since we have no real choice but to participate. and, i still maintain, if you want to live an average life.. you have no choice but to join the machine and slave away for forty hours a week for forty years. 

you'd think technology would make is such that a forty hour work work wasn't necessary. but, the way the system is designed... to be an average person, almost everyone must be a cog in the machine and work for 40 hours.

also, even if i agreed that we're not slaves... would you at least agree the coercive nature of the way things is, could at least be a philoophic underpinning for liberal social contract theories?

do you deny that the large majority of people have no choice but to participate in our workers' economic system, at least to some extent, if they want to survive? 

also feel free respond  to my reply to the last person above 

How would you prefer to survive— realistically, that is?

i realize any form of existence will involve struggle, maybe my thing is not having a real choice. that's why i maintain there is something in fact that can be called 'voluntary slavery'. 

I understand the gripe here, and you are correct in that there are almost no opportunities for an individual to live the alternative way I'm describing because almost every chunk of land on earth has been claimed by some large group of people, but even acknowledging that reality makes this argument weak at best. Essentially you're arguing that you are a slave because current human civilization won't allow you the luxury of being able to live entirely as a caveman or hunter/gatherer and instead forces you to work for things like running water and clothes. Again, nothing about that fits with the baggage carried by the word slave.

An element of slavery perhaps, but it's not the element from which the term derives it's real meaning. This is like when someone says taxation is theft. You can argue it on a technical basis but just like slavery, the word has an emotional connotation that comes from a very different idea. When we think of theft we think of the guy breaking into your house or robbing a liquor store. It's dishonest to use the emotional baggage generated by that idea against taxation because taxation is a very different thing. Likewise, it's dishonest to call yourself a slave because you don't like the system our society has set up. Being unhappy with it is perfectly fine, but if you're arguing your position honestly you would need to use different verbage to articulate it.

But what is an "average life"? I think a major part of the issue here is that you take the simple things I mentioned for granted. Until about 2 centuries ago no one had ever even heard of electricity. Ketchup was invented not to make fries taste better, but to mask the taste of rotting meat because there was no such thing as refrigerators. You say you don't want to be a part of the machine, but without the machine none of these things would be possible, so unless you truly don't want running water and electricity, unless you truly don't care about eating meat that isn't turning brown and rotting as a means of survival, it seems you do want to enjoy these things but just don't want to contribute to them.

If all you want is to survive, you really don't need to work 40 hours. You can find a city where there is public transportation, rent a room, and have just barely enough leftover to eat and clothe yourself. If you want more, like TV, a phone, a comfortable bed... Then this isn't slavery. It's a choice to work harder to do better and to have luxuries that people who were born centuries ago had no opportunity to attain or even experience.

what if we just used the word 'like'? 

taxation is 'like' theft? i'm not a libertarian, but i understand why a person would say this.

the lack of an option in choosing to participate in our system, is 'like' slavery?

i suppose it's possible to say it's all pie in the sky, it's just different philosophical ways of looking at things. 

It's like these things in some ways, it's unlike them in others. I don't see why then we need to bring extreme terms into the conversation. Just focus on expressing the issue you have, I think that would make your point clearer and less objectionable.

This isn’t all that clear. You acknowledge the necessity of struggle, but you believe you have no “real” choice. Choice in what? How you struggle? But you do have a choice. And you call this alleged lack of choice “voluntary”?

Yeah, that way of viewing things does lack nuance.

You aren't forced to work for somebody else. You always have the option not to. No matter the consequences of that, there is no coercion involved so long as your prospective boss isn't the cause of said consequence. For example, you ate the last of your food and were unable to afford more, so you starved, but the cause of said running out of food wasn't another person. Being unable to afford more food likewise wasn't caused, as no one forcibly took away money you already had and would've used for this purpose (except the state when it taxes you, but I digress).

You might retort that food exists and your local supermarket's employees prevent you from just walking out with it, but that food was grown. It is the product of another's labors. Under a Georgist understanding you may be entitled to the natural fruits of the earth, but the pre-modern world didn't spontaneously generate vast quantities of wheat or magically see it ground into flour. The value added by humans belongs to them, not to you.

Then, you might add that owners of the means of production don't labor, meaning they don't add value to the earth's bounty. Rather, employees do. My answer is that owners do by proxy; their responsibility is to do the work, but they entered into consensual arrangements to sublet the responsibility to others for a fixed fraction of the end harvest. Because this didn't involve slavery, it wasn't immoral.

The final objection is to challenge their right to own the land to the exclusion of others. My answer is that arrangements involving private ownership of land and resources have proven most efficient in creating wealth for the masses, compared to all alternatives that both are known and have been tried. This is evident by all of the world's advanced economies having private property rights, and by no known anarchic society (e.g. countries in the middle of civil wars) being prosperous by modern standards.

So far as you lack the ability to change the way things are, it's because you lack the moral and legal right to do so. It's not oppression to be denied the ability to do what you mustn't do.

I will say that you are a "slave" to society so far as it informs your view of reality and traps your mind in a limited bubble. The best way to get around this is to study foreign or non-current perspectives. For example, pre-modern philosophies and diverse literature from around the world, and learn the history of the rise and fall of nations. This will broaden your horizons and give you a panoramic view of things transcending modern biases and blindspots.